Archives / September, 2004

Picking Your VC

Jeff Nolan has a great post entitled Pick Your VC Carefully. A must read for any entrepreneur (or VC for that matter). It’s worth the full read, but his main points are: 1. Pick the right type of investor — big, small and specialized, financial, corporate. 2. Check their references! 3. Make sure you understand how much pull your investor has within his or her firm. All good advice, some overlap with my posting on How to Negotiate a Term Sheet with a VC. My only addition beyond what’s already in that post is that if you’re adding a new investor into a syndicate, make sure you have your existing investors spend time speaking with the prospective investor, both with…

Comment on Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part II: Admitting Mistakes

Comment on Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part II: Admitting Mistakes My colleague Mike Mayor writes: So you’e only asking for politicians to be honest Matt? Is that all? 🙂 Couldn’t agree more on the CEO side. A CEO who cannot admit to failure is doomed to be surrounded by “yes men” and, therefore, must go it alone, whereas the CEO who admits to having the odd bad idea every now and then is more likely to get truthful and accuruate information from those around him/her. Which scenario would you prefer to base your next decision on? However, I look more to Hollywood for fostering the faux CEO/Board Room stereotypes, not politics. Look no further than the highest ranked show among…

When Do You Hire a Real Head of Sales?

When Do You Hire a Real Head of Sales? A fellow entrepreneur I’m friendly with who’s got a really early stage company asked me the other day when he should hire his first head of sales. I think the answer completely depends on what kind of business you’re in and how dependent it is on external relationship building, and also what kind of entrepreneur you are. But I tried to distill my answer down to three things for him to think about: If your company requires a meaningful amount of customer participation before your initial product is launched, you need to invest in sales months ahead of anticipated revenue. This was the case for us at Return Path. We hired…

Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part II: Admitting Mistakes

Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part II: Admitting Mistakes The press conference this past spring where President Bush embarrassingly refused to admit that he had ever made any big mistakes, other than to reiterate his gaffe at trading Sammy Sosa when he owned the Texas Rangers, brings up another issue in this series: is it good for leaders, both political and corporate, to admit mistakes? On the corporate side, I think the ability to admit a mistake is a must. Again, I’ll refer back to Jim Collins’ books Good to Great and Built to Last, both of which talk about humility and the ability to admit mistakes as a critical component of emotional intelligence, the cornerstone of solid leadership. And in…

Change of Name?

Change of Name Fellow CEO Greg Reinacker posted an open question on his blog about whether he should change the name of his company, NewsGator. This is a GREAT topic. We struggled with it for years at MovieFone, because at some point, the Internet became a huge part of the business, and the name seemed antiquated. Plus, everyone knew us by the phone number, 777-FILM (or whatever number it happened to be in any given city). But it had 10 years of brand equity at that point behind it. Return Path used to be called uLocate.com a really long time ago, and we changed the name to be less “dot com” three months after we got started (that’a story for…

Spam: Crisis, or Approaching Denoument?

Spam: Crisis, or Approaching Denoument? A few interesting comments on this front today. Fred says the crisis is over, everyone should just calm down. Pamela says spam filtering technology is getting really good now. And I had lunch with Saul Hansell from The New York Times today, who thinks that authentication will make a monumental difference. [For those of you who read OnlyOnce and aren’t super technical, authentication is the newest trend that ISPs are starting to employ to snuff out spammers. In a nutshell, it’s a technology like Caller ID that lets an ISP verify who’s sending the mail so they can shut it down if the mailer is clearly a bad guy (or someone who blocks Caller ID).]…

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, Continued

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, Continued My colleague Ed Taussig had a great comment on this posting that I thought I’d share since no one ever reads comments on blogs. Firing someone should always be considered an opportunity for “Lessons Learned” – i.e. was there anything that as a manager I could have done differently to avoid getting to the point of having to fire someone in the first place? Was it a failure to interview/hire properly in the first place? Was there a failure to mentor them or to give them constructive feedback before the problem became irreparable? Did I make an effort to find out what might be affecting their performance? There will be times when the…

9/11 Remembered in NYC

It’s the end of a long September 11 in New York City. We thought everyone would want to see the Tribeca close-up of the “twin beams” memorial that comes out from time to time to evoke the memory of the fallen towers. The beams are truly amazing, reaching up high into the sky, seemingly endless. While they are geographically incorrect from this particular view (the towers stood behind and to the left of the new construction of the new 7 World Trade Center), they do the job and from most views look in place.

RSS and Email's Demise, Continued

RSS and Email’s Demise, Continued Thanks to my colleague Tom Bartel, I discovered two good postings this week that I thought I’d pass on. The first one by Ed Brill talks about Email vs. RSS and is a great contribution to the debate. It has some similar thoughts to my original posting about Prepping RSS for Prime Time. The second one by Christopher Knight is entitled 22 Reasons Why Email Is Not Dead and is a great contribution to the dialog I contributed to in my Rumors of Email’s Demise posting a while back.

Our Next July 4?

Our Next July 4? We could hear the church bells ringing this morning out our window at the 9/11 memorial ceremony as we observed a moment of silence at 8:48 a.m. to remember. What really got me, though, was when I walked past the site and heard some of the names being called out by parents of the victims, their voices alternating between bravely strong and quivering with emotion. There will always be something awful about this day every year, a wound reopened fresh over a healing scar. I hope that it will continue to serve as a unifying force in our country, an annual rallying cry against those in the world who threaten our way of life and seek…

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, Continued

One of my first postings was about how challenging it can be to fire people. This is a topic that can probably consume volumes, but Jerry Colonna has just written a great piece about it for his column in Inc. that’s definitely worth a read.